[Web4lib] "open" library/book web services

[Lars Aronsson]

Fred Edwards wrote:

> Has anyone collected or know of a list of "open" (ie. free or 
> free for educational institutions) web services for library / 
> book related information?
> 
> We're looking at providing information to our users beyond what 
> is found in our opac.
> 
> in particular, "Tables of Content" and Author biographies
> 
> We're currently playing with Amazon, LoC and Google books but 
> the hit rate is mediocre at best and frequently truncated.

I have no answers, but find the question interesting.  How do you 
determine the hit rate?  Do you have a list of your 1000 most 
wanted authors, and for how many of them were you able to find 
biographies?  Obviously, not all author names in your OPAC will be 
equal.  Having a bio for one author might be 10 or 100 times more 
useful than having a bio for some other author.

LibraryThing.com has a similar problem: People catalog their books 
and the website presents a page for each author, but initially 
that page is a mere list of the authors' works.  So the site 
allows any user to add a link to an author biography, which can be 
a Wikipedia article, a webpage created by fans, or the author's 
own website.  In some cases, I have written a Wikipedia article 
about an author, only to be able to add that link to LibraryThing.  
What's available is not static, since I can contribute to 
Wikipedia.

If you have a list of your 100, 1000 or 10,000 most wanted 
authors, we can find links to Wikipedia articles where they are 
available, and post the rest of your list to Wikipedia's wishlist.

Tables of content is another issue.  They won't go into Wikipedia 
because they aren't "encyclopedic" in nature.  They should be in a 
good library catalog, but both LoC and OCLC are failing.  Maybe 
the OpenLibrary.org will ultimately be the answer here.

If you go to http://libris.kb.se/bib/10086340?language=en
you will find a Wikipedia link in the lower right corner, but only 
for author Jefferson, not for editors Oberg and McClure.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se